Posts Tagged ‘Spam-Blogs’

A Dirty Spam Trick

By Jonathan Bailey • Jan 7th, 2008 • Category: Articles, Prevention

Earlier today, I ran across a post on Digg that referenced a blog readability test.
The idea behind the test is simple. You type in the URL of your blog or site and it tells you the approximate reading level required to understand it. It got me curious about the readibility of this site so I [...]



2008: Looking Ahead

By Jonathan Bailey • Jan 2nd, 2008 • Category: Articles, DMCA, Legal Issues, News

Considering that my predictions for 2007 fell somewhere between “mixed” and “unmitigated disaster” I am almost loathe to try again. However, in the spirit of the season, I almost can not control myself.
So, with that in mind, I’m taking a look at the year ahead with seven new predictions about what is in store for [...]



Protecting Content by Using Static Pages

By Jonathan Bailey • Dec 12th, 2007 • Category: Articles, Prevention, Punditry

In a recent interview on b-l-o-g-g-e-r.com, Dennis de Bernardy commented on the issue of content theft and spam blogs
Bernardy, the creator of Semilogic Pro, which is a pack of themes and plugins for WordPress targeted at business users, said that the problem was due to RSS feeds and recommended what many would call drastic action.
There [...]



More Updates to Stopping Internet Plagiarism

By Jonathan Bailey • Dec 7th, 2007 • Category: Articles, DMCA, Housekeeping, Legal Issues

In continuing the work that I began last week on the Stopping Internet Plagiarism section of the site, I’ve updated two more chapters of the work, Contacting the Plagiarist and Contacting the Host.
In both cases the updates were relatively minor in nature but both chapters required some work to bring them back up to code. [...]



The FeedBurner Question

By Jonathan Bailey • Dec 5th, 2007 • Category: Articles, Prevention, Products

When I started Plagiarism Today approximately two and a half years ago, FeedBurner seemed like a Godsend. Not only was it a powerful way to track your feed’s usage, but it was also an easy way to customize the feed’s features, all while ensuring compatibility across the board.
FeedBurner took the complicated black art of feed [...]



Making the Switch: Going From Partial to Full Feeds

By Jonathan Bailey • Nov 28th, 2007 • Category: Articles, Prevention, Products

Content theft and RSS scraping is not going away. As more and more spammers get into the game and the tools they use improve in effectiveness, the problem is only going to get worse. Because of this, RSS feeds are going to remain vulnerable and bloggers will continue to seek out ways to protect them.
However, [...]



Update: Trackback/Comment Spam

By Jonathan Bailey • Nov 21st, 2007 • Category: Articles, Products

To offer a quick update on the trackback/comment spam attack I reported on yesterday, the attack is continuing in earnest today but things seem to be much more under control now.
reCAPTCHA is still holding the comment spam at bay and I have swapped out Akismet for Defensio in hopes of reducing the number of trackbacks [...]



Massive Trackback/Comment Spam Attack

By Jonathan Bailey • Nov 20th, 2007 • Category: Articles, News, Personal Experiences

Over the past 96 hours Plagiarism Today, as well as likely other sites, has been the subject of a massive spam attack across a variety of formats and domains.
The attack, which appears to have begun sometime on Friday, has been persistent for the past four days. However, at this juncture, it appears that my defenses [...]



Google’s Shell Games

By Jonathan Bailey • Nov 16th, 2007 • Category: Articles, DMCA, Legal Issues, Punditry

Anyone who is a regular reader to this site knows that, in order to get Adsense removed from a scraper or plagiarist’s page, you are required to file a DMCA notice.
Adsense has its own DMCA policy and follows it very strictly. Though results can be obtained through that means, few bloggers actually use it.
Not only [...]



CAPTCHAs and the DMCA

By Jonathan Bailey • Nov 14th, 2007 • Category: Articles, DMCA, Legal Issues, Prevention

Yesterday I received an email Ben Maurer, one of the engineers for reCAPTCHA.
In addition to responding to a comment on a post from last week, he alerted me to a copyright case involving Tickmaster (TM) and RMG Technologies. According to the complaint and subsequent injunction (embedded below), RMG produced an application that allowed users [...]